Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday January 23, 2009 @06:24PM
from the fanbois-of-the-world-unite dept.

bradgoodman writes to tell us that tomorrow will mark the 25th anniversary of the first Macintosh, debuting just 2 days after the famous Super Bowl XVIII commercial. "'The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,' said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind 'Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley,' an online historical exhibit. 'The gold standard now for personal electronics is, "Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?" People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way.'"

Yep, I was one of those who bought one during the first 100 days. All I remember was how painful it was swapping 3.5" floppies in and out of that computer. It was easy but painful. The Apple Lisa was much better and had a hard disk (that amazing 5mb Apple Profile). Sadly it was 3-4 times the price.

Clearly you never had to wait for your dad to shell out $400 for a 5.25" floppy drive upgrade on your Commodore 64 because your cassette drive would just take FOREVER to load Temple of Apshai (which, until this very post some 25 years later -- Christ... -- I thought was spelled Aphsai).

I know that at this point, "RTFA" has become a running joke... but you're the first person I've seen who hasn't even bothered to read the comment which he's replying to! Way to set a new bar for other slashdotters to meet...

I know that at this point, "RTFA" has become a running joke... but you're the first person I've seen who hasn't even bothered to read the comment which he's replying to! Way to set a new bar for other slashdotters to meet...

The really funny part is that he didn't even read the comment which he was replying to!

Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land, is the operating phrase of most major technology companies. Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they most definitely settled it. They did not invent postscript, but they definitely established it. And they did not invent the GUI but they settled it.

But taken as a whole, the mac was really a pioneering achievement, When you consider what was available at the time. Sure Xerox had their star systems, people used floppies and so on. But to put it all together in (relatively) cheap system that did not have a command line at all and sell it to consumers was a huge risk. And one that took a lot of innovations to make all work together. It had an original OS. It used software driven instruments to do everything (apple desktop bus. disk timing, character generators, etc...)

Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.

Aside from being copypasta, the pasted text has everything backwards. It's Windows which was designed for narrow-minded idiots. The Mac was always about expanding possibilities, doing new and different things.

And that's what makes it a marvelously effective troll. Only the bigots can detect the substitution*. (As a notable corollary, only the bigots care.) The rest of us lol a bit, mostly at the joke, but juuuust a little at the bigots slapfighting each other. ("No, you're a tard, Mac!" "No, you're a tard, PC!")

*"substitution" == pretending the joke is supposed to be on the other guys. In truth, it's on both of you.

The rest of us lol a bit, mostly at the joke, but juuuust a little at the bigots slapfighting each other. ("No, you're a tard, Mac!" "No, you're a tard, PC!")

Yeah, I guess I got a little fished in there... although I knew at the time I was just responding to a pointless troll. I guess what I'd like is more slashdot discussions that don't require the debunking of tired myths before we can get to the interesting discussion.

No, the joke is precisely what it appears to be: making fun of pretentious Apple fanatics. In reality it doesn't matter what OS you use so long as it suits your purpose, but when you debate the relative pros and cons of apple products versus anything else, you're going to get marked down if you even imply the big A's products are overhyped and, at times, overpriced.

You don't see very many Windows zealots, and Linux evangelists are often still capable of pointing out Linux's own flaws. When it comes to Apple

Of course, your rants about uncritical Apple worship are nothing but bullshit. Apple fans can be aggressively critical of Apple, and they aren't conformists. The problem is that on forums like this, so many people spout utter lies and bullshit, that it needs to be debunked before we can get to the constructive and rational criticisms. Posts like yours do nothing but drive the discourse away from that and towards the "zealotry" you supposedly despise. If you actually made reasonable accusations and criticism

While the TAM was incredibly forward-looking and foreshadowed Apple's coming priority of cutting-edge industrial design, I think its status as a "commemorative" model was very much a product of the Gil Amelio era at Apple. Somehow that sort of status for a product doesn't seem to fit in with Apple's present-day, minimalist offering strategy.

Yeah, but I can still hope for some kind of a Mac Mini-level revision with a bump in speed and a built-in iPod dock to come out tomorrow at a price point of $666.66 (between the prices of the two current configurations), perhaps merging in features of the Apple TV platform.

Or even better, how about a pocket-sized Mac Micro? That would be a shocker!

No. Steve has publicly said that Apple today is about looking to the future, not being nostalgic about the past. He really seems to hate fetishes and nostalgia. I can see where he's coming from, because Apple could very easily get caught up in repeating the past and reminiscing about the good old days.

That you mention "Apples Superbowl Commercial" and people know it. My dad knows, and is a real estate manager! That commercial really sticks in peoples mind. I would love to see apple come out with another commercial of that caliber. The Hal9000 commercial wasn't nearly as cool...

I have two Macs at home, but I don't think my Grandmother could handle it. How do you explain the difference between quitting an application and simply closing the window? My wife has the same issue...

Why should your grandmother care? If she wants to surf the web, she clicks on Safari in the dock. If it's already running, she'll get a window to browse the web with. If it's not running, it will load and she'll get a window to browse the web with.

Keeping track of which applications are currently running is something for techies who are concerned with memory usage and such because they actually know how their computer works. Your grandmother doesn't so neither does she needs to know the difference between closing a window and closing an application.

Talking about a "good OS" is all very well, but did classic MacOS on the Macintosh 128k do these things?It didn't need to. It never ran a multitasking version of MacOS, IIRC. I may be mistaken though.

(And indeed, although I know that modern OSs do do this, I'd be curious to see them tested in practice - how well does OS X, or any other OS come to that, run if you never ever close anything down?)Just fine, as long as you aren't constantly switching between every application you have open. I just looked at m

She'll care when it's "Why does my computer keep running slow?" or even that she doesn't have enough memory to open applications. Especially 25 years ago, when OSs didn't swap out RAM, and RAM was very limited.

Are you actually saying that users never closing applications was intended behaviour?

Just explain the difference between an application and a window. Grandmothers typically aren't stupid. Grandmothers of the original Mac era easily understood it. The only reason people today don't understand it is that they've gotten used to the Windows way, where a window is perceived as the application.

The only reason people today don't understand it is that they've gotten used to the Windows way, where a window is perceived as the application.

I've used a variety of OSs, so I don't think this is the issue. It's fundamental UI problem - there's no visual indication that the application is still running, so one assumes it isn't. This doesn't have to be a window - e.g., on AmigaOS you could close windows, but still leave a screen open for it.

I've used a variety of OSs, so I don't think this is the issue. It's fundamental UI problem - there's no visual indication that the application is still running, so one assumes it isn't.

There are several visual indicators. If the application is frontmost, then its name is displayed in the menu bar. An icon for the application shows when you hit CMD-Tab to activate the application switcher. Running applications are also highlighted in the Dock, and shown in Activity Monitor.

I don't see what the problem is. It's perfectly rational and simple to learn and understand.

Have you even used OSX? There are signs that it's still running:1. The application is still in the title bar (assuming you don't click the background or something else immediately).2. The Dock shows the application runnning

That said.. my dad, who's not stupid, doesn't get it either. I point it out to him all the time. He's worked with technology his whole life, starting with telecom (especially cypto stuff) in the Air Force, then worked with phone systems since then.. 40+ years now. Yet he's helpless wi

There is this lady who lives next door to my mother. She has a business gardening and is pretty low tech. For years she used an old mac to do her accounting. Apparently she made a mistake at one point and lost the lot. Overwrote a file or something.

The mac is easy enough for non technical people to use but they need to get advice some times on managing their data.

Apple is mostly responsible for true innovation in marketing. Actually, there is another case where they did something great for everyone: firewire. (memory security issues notwithstanding...) But everything that the mac is known for was done by someone else first. What they did was make it marketable. Unfortunately they also did it very poorly. The Macintosh was a graphic-only machine with zero graphics acceleration until the release of the 8*24 GC. A moment later, the Amiga cost little more than a games c

Are you kidding? 1984 was exactly like 1984, the personal computer was just a ploy by the government to gain access to our very thoughts. What you don't know is that MAC OS and WINDOWS and even LINUX are all running rootkits that grant access to the NWO. Everything you type is monitored. Why do you think new computers come with video cameras standard??? So they can monitor you...

Which is why I use my Amiga for personal pursuits. Although, I am sure that once Obamamerica finds out that I have a non-approved device connected to the Internet, and I have thoughts of my own which are not directed by video streams of passing the buck and exceptional exceptions to hard and fast rules, and countless advertisements about non-consensual consensus, I will have to go into hiding.

25 years and computers still don't boot any faster. A 8MHz 128k Mac would boot in about 20 seconds. Now computers are clocked about 500 times faster and it takes 10 times longer. What's a factor of 5000 among friends?

It's really not a general OS thing. I have new OSes on hardware that I got 4 or 5 years ago and it runs just as quick as the OSes I was running back then, if not faster. There is no reason why all OSes shouldn't be getting faster rather than slower as hardware speed increases.

Honestly, I think the evolution of suspend states has more than made up for it. Granted, you're still drawing a bit of power while in sleep, but modern Macs use next to nothing in that state and wake near-instantaneously.

Coupled with an OS that can run for weeks without a reboot, I've no complaints.

In the first Macs, the system software was stored in the ROM, and didn't have to be read from slow, clunky, rewriteable disks. There's also the minor fact that the Mac 128 didn't have to start the window compositor, the wi-fi extensions, the journaled file systems, quickly check the directory structure and file system integrity, and load several gigabytes of data from the disk, whilst also activating the swap and pre-emptively buffering data during boot.

Many of the original processing concepts of the Macintosh 68000 CPU came from Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 which celebrated its 40th birthday last year. The data/address separation as well as the instruction set sequencing via a two-step clock. The PDP-10 "DDT" debugging tool also had an equivalent that could be invoked by using the "programmers switch" (which was a cheap little plastic doohicky which slid into place on the side of the original Macs and, when pressed, would directly activate a switch on the motherboard and drop you into a debugger)

Great hardware. We have literally hundreds of DS10s at work and faults are rare. But DEC were terrified of Microsoft. They pushed hard to get Windows NT on alpha and it ran very well but there weren't enough good reasons for people to buy DEC hardware.

Apple had enough confidence (possibly Jobs's confidence) to go their own way and it paid off.

Are you referring to the memory buses here? The only data/address separation in the 68K instruction set was the separation between data and address registers, which the PDP-10 didn't have (it just had 16 GPRs).

The "PDP" that the 68K more closely resembles from a programming point of view is the PDP-11, with more complex addressing modes and an operand/operand orientation rather than the register/memory orientation of the PDP-10.

I got one of the first Macs. It wasn't my first computer with a mouse; we had those at work for chip design. But those cost over $100K each. My fellow engineers couldn't believe that I got a computer at home with a mouse and windows/menus for only $2500!

It even made it into our family Christmas card photo that year:

http://arneberg.com/family/xmas/xmas1984.jpg

(This is my first-ever slashdot post...how do I get a web link to work?)

When a friend of my dads got one of the first macs we went around to his place to remonstrate with him. We pointed out that there was no software to buy for it. You couldn't see much on the tiny screen and the way you used it it looked like a toy.

But I noticed that they keyboard was small. It only had the buttons you needed, you could select with the mouse, and the whole system left a lot of space on a cluttered desk.

I wondered where the computer was. In the keyboard or behind the screen? I couldn't fig

Xerox made computers with a GUI and mouse before Apple, but they cost a fortune, and were pieces of feces. The disk drive on the Interlisp D machine I used was powered by a rubber belt (like a vacuum cleaner). And just like a vacuum cleaner, it occasionally popped off or broke. Also, the entire file system was stored in Lisp nodes, so when you deleted a large directory, it stopped doing anything for over a minute while it garbage collected all the deleted files.

I have a Mac Plus. I got it specifically to run a particular version of AppleShare that allowed you to boot an Apple IIgs over an AppleTalk connection. And I never got around to actually doing it. Hmm, now there's something I can look into doing once I get that desk rebuilt. I know I've got an old 40 MB SCSI drive lying around somewhere....

Ummm.... the Mac plus had SCSI and the 512 supported a hard drive they made for the floppy port. I think that drive worked with the 128 as well. The floppy port HDD's were pretty slow but they worked.

When the Plus was a new machine, I had an Atari ST at home though. The ST was cheaper, just as fast, had built-in MIDI, an awesome audio chipset, color graphics, an ugly GUI and much cooler games. I got a Mac Plus later.

I have a Mac 128 with an Apple Imagewriter, one of the first ones where they used a regular DB25 cable instead of the Appletalk cable.
I can't believe its 25 years old. I bought it in 1990 for the printer.
I think the lady said she paid $4500 for it. At the time I told her that could buy her a very nice '386

Isn't it funny... the more powerful computers get, the things we do with them get lamer and more trivial. 1984 - testing and developing scientific theories on a machine with 128K RAM; 2009 - posting on slashdot with 4GB RAM.

My dad bought one when it came out... passed it onto me, and it's now sitting in my kids room where they either pretend to work or play some basic games on it. Only problem I've had is the video went out and had to reinforce the connection a bit, but that did give me a chance to look at the engraved signatures on the inside.

Not a bad investment all things considered... wish other computers would last that long...

I remember the first time I tried using a Mac - in a sort of technology "cave" in the J.C. Penny's in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania back in 1985. It felt so strange, but just seemed to make sense - especially when I went back to home muck about on my TRS-80 Colour Computer.

Flash-forward a few years later and I go to university and leave my beloved dot-matrix printer behind. I joined the newspaper and became very well acquainted by this application humorously called "Quark Xpress" and the Mac SE/80. Now this little thing seemed perfect - full WYSIWYG printing, networking, and fun version of Risk to while away the hours. After a little practice, I started to do things I never thought I could do...

That continued a few years later when I started investigating using my Mac at home for simple movie editing with this new piece of software called "QuickTime". Unfortunately for me, Dad had bought a Performa 450, so no movie editing for me!

After Windows 95 was released, I dated a Windows-using girl and drifted away from the Mac.

Then everything changed in 1997 and 1998. I finally began receiving a decent pay packet, moved in with the girl and splurged on a beige Mac G3 minitower (that I sold the next year to buy the Blue and White minitower).

I started doing things that I always wanted to do, but never thought possible - programming screen savers, scanning negatives and working on my photography, using a beta of this funny app from Macromedia called "FinalCut" to edit some commercials, then getting hired at a large publishing company because I was a paid-up member of the Apple club.

More than anything else (aesthetics, politics, etc), my Macintosh PC's have always enabled me to fully express my creativity with a minimum of fuss. Windows computers just give me headaches and have for years - and always seem to be working against me.

I hope the next 25 years (and pretty much the next third of my life if I'm fortunate) will be filled with Apple-creative things that similarly enrich and enable my creativity and make life all the sweeter.

1: Sealing up the original Mac while Apple II and IBM PC were open architectures.
2: Comparably higher prices for equivalent performance and peripherals.
3: Absolute hostility to clone makers, which allowed Apple to pass on their inefficiency to their customers.
4: Floppy disc incompatibility with other more prevalent systems for far too long.
5: Threats to discontinue warranty coverage from anybody who dared crack the sealed-box open.
6: Taking forever to provide an internal hard drive long after their PC competition and 3rd party suppliers (anyone remember HyperDrive) had shown them how to do it.
7: Needing to dump Steve Jobs before an Open Mac arrived.
8: The most expensive (by far) laser printer on the market when the excellent HP LaserJet met many user's needs with the same print engine for far less money.
9: 50% profit margins and proud of it!